Hannah Arendt's political phenomenology of world Borren, M.

343 Pages·2017·6.78 MB·English

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Amor mundi: Hannah Arendt's political phenomenology of world
Borren, M.
Publication date
2010
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Final published version
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Borren, M. (2010). Amor mundi: Hannah Arendt's political phenomenology of world. [Thesis,
fully internal, Universiteit van Amsterdam]. F & N Eigen Beheer.
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Download date:26 Jan 2023
Amor Mundi.

Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology of world

Marieke Borren
Cover design: Mathijs Lieshout
Cover illustration: Mathijs Lieshout, Greek theatre at Segesta, Sicily, 3d century BC; pencil
on paper, 2009.

Produced by F & N Eigen Beheer, Amsterdam

ISBN: 9789078675891

Dit proefschrift werd mede mogelijk gemaakt met financiële steun van het Duitsland
Instituut bij de Universiteit van Amsterdam en de De Bussy Stichting.
Amor Mundi.

Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology of world

ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT

ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor
aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam
op gezag van de Rector Magnificus
prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom
ten overstaan van een door het college van promoties ingestelde
commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel
op donderdag 9 september 2010, te 12:00 uur

door

Marieke Borren

geboren te Vlaardingen
Promotiecommissie

Promotor: prof. dr. A.J.J. Nijhuis
Copromotor: dr. V.L.M. Vasterling

Overige leden: prof. dr. D. De Schutter
prof. dr. J. Früchtl
prof. dr. H.P. Kunneman
prof. dr. B. Roessler
dr. K.V.Q. Vintges

Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen
Voor Mathijs

Table of contents

Abbreviations xi

Introduction: integrating phenomenological philosophy, historiography
and political theory 1
The debate between modernists and postmodernists in recent Arendt-scholarship 4
Structure of this book 9

Part I. Political phenomenology 15

Ch 1. Arendt’s hermeneutic phenomenology: understanding and
deconstruction 15
1. The phenomenological tradition 17
2. Arendt’s hermeneutic phenomenology 20
3. Hermeneutic Exercises 26
Critique: dismantling 27
Paradoxes 34
Experiment: storytelling 35
4. The scholar-as-spectator: situated and critical impartiality 38
5. Challenging scientism and metaphysics 43
6. Misunderstandings: experience, facts and distinctions 47
Experience 47
Factuality 48
Discriminating and distinctions 50
Finally: Zu den Sachen selbst! and the broken thread of tradition 52

Ch 2. Phenomenological anthropology 55
1. Anthropological starting point: the totalitarian experience 57
2. Arendt’s phenomenology of the vita activa 63
The ‘who’, the ‘what’ and the person’s life-story 67
Plurality, natality and freedom 72
Table of contents
The life of the mind and the human conditions 73
3. Arendt’s phenomenological topology of reality 74
Nature and the objective world 74
The objective and the intersubjective world 77
4. The worldliness of human existence and the paradoxes of plurality 82
The inter-esse, the space of appearances and the web of relationships 87
Conclusion Part I: Arendt’s hermeneutic phenomenology and the
traditions of metaphysics, scientism and poststructuralism 91

Part II. The common world, community and the citizen 97

Introduction 97

Ch 3. Political community and the contract 101
1. The general will and enlightened self-interest: Rousseau and Hobbes 101
Solipsism 103
Unity 105
Naturalism 106
Sovereignty 107
Instability and violence 108
Hostility to plurality and worldlessness 111
2. Arendt’s alternative: the promise, opinion, action-in-concert 112
Opinion 114
Promises 115
Power as action-in-concert 117
Conclusion 117

Ch 4. Common sense 119
1. Experience and the sense of the real 123
2. Understanding and judging 129
3. Neither transcendentalism nor empiricism 132

Ch 5. Arendt and Derrida on friendship and the problem of
political community 137
1. Friendship and brotherhood 139
2. Fraternization, différance and the coming friendship 140
3. Brotherhood and the loss of world and plurality 143
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Table of contents
4. Towards a politics or an ethics of friendship? 146
5. (M/F) = 2. Many is more than two 147
6. The ‘coming community’ and the common world 148

Part III. Politics of in/visibility: world as space of appearances 151

Introduction 151
1. The private and the public and the pathologies of in/visibility 151
Public invisibility 152
Natural visibility 157
2. The social and the political and the pathologies of in/visibility 158
Social in/visibility 159
Conclusion: the pathologies of citizenship 161

Ch 6. Public visibility and private invisibility 163
1. Publicity: public appearance and participatory visibility 163
2. Privacy: the private realm of non-appearance and invisibility 167
3. The paradox of revealing and concealing: the mask 170
Conclusion: citizenship 175

Ch 7. The pathologies of in/visibility I: public invisibility and
natural visibility. On the stateless and today’s illegal aliens 177
1. European refugees between the wars 177
2. The in/visibility of stateless refugees 181
Rethinking human rights and the nation-state 191
3. Today’s in/visible aliens 193

Ch 8. The pathologies of in/visibility II: social in/visibility.
The social question, the race question, the Jewish question and
the woman question 207
1. Councils 210
2. The social question 213
3. The Jewish question 217
4. The race question 222
5. The woman question 226
6. Gestaltswitch from justice to freedom 232

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